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CSE webinar: Making the best use of the National Heat Map

Free event on 30 October, starting 18.00

1 October 2012

The National Heat Map is designed to identify locations where heat distribution projects like district heating schemes are likely to be viable. A typical user of the NHM would be someone working for a local authority, an engineering firm, power company or even a community group.

CSE will host a free webinar on using this innovative tool on 30 October, 2012, starting at 18.00.

Free to use and publicly accessible, the National Heat Map was developed by CSE and is funded by the Department of Energy & Climate Change. It can generate high-resolution maps of heat demand for any geographical area in England (see picture below).

National heat map on split screen mode over Bury St Edmunds and showing one of the control panels operating

This webinar follows the success our wind power webinar held in July, and the format will be very similar.

The main demonstration and talk will last around 30 minutes, followed by a 15 minutes Q&A. 'Attendees' will be encouraged to put questions to the presenter, CSE's Zoe Redgrove, in advance. Zoe will attempt to answer these on the night but if we run out of time these will be followed up and circulated after the event.

The provisional agenda is:

About the heat map – where the data comes from, etc

Functionality of the heat map – looking at different layers, layout and selection tools

And if you can't make it on 30 October, don't worry. A recorded version of the webinar will be on this website very soon after.

The future of energy mapping
Joshua Thumim, CSE’s Head of Research and Analysis, explains why the National Heat Map could make such a difference to the development of local energy projects.

"It represents a big step forward in the use of the web to provide intelligence and support. The heat map combines a very detailed geographic model of energy use with visualisation and reporting tools, and provides sophisticated GIS functionality to non-technical users via a standard web browser. We think it’s the future of energy mapping.”

What makes it particularly useful is both its detail – it uses modelled estimates of annual heat demand for every address in England, allowing the user to investigate energy use patterns at the level of individual buildings and streets – and the tools that are provided for analysing this information.

With the exception of public buildings, the heat map was produced entirely without access to the meter readings or energy bills of individual premises, so contains no personal information whatsoever.